Back in MY DAY...

I hesitate to call myself an 'old school gamer'--I don't really even think of myself as a gamer much anymore, either, because I've gotten too busy and too broke to really be as into games as I used to be. The thing with me is, I tend to go through long periods of not paying any attention at all to something I love, then long periods of complete obsession with it. My interests seldom wane, and I still love everything all the same as I did before, just that when I'm interested in something it tends to completely take up my entire brain, leaving no room for anything else--so I have to cycle through them one at a time, until I've had my fill, and then go to something else. It's hard to explain.

And also that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I didn't actually get my first gaming console until I was fifteen--it was a Playstation 2, when it was still a thing but after it wasn't quite so new and shiny and my parents could merit spending money on it. It wasn't even technically mine, but my brother's. So I'm a bit behind the times. Though I did, whenever possible, play any video games I could from Super Nintendo onward at friend's houses. If someone had a game system, I was their best friend. Yes, I was a friendship whore for video games. What of it?

I wasn't totally deprived of games. I played computer games for years, which my parents didn't seem to have a problem with. I think because my dad was a computer engineer by trade and so my parents--or at least my dad--did view computers as being a legitimate tool and not an engine of Satan used to trap kids in gaming addictions. Or something like that. Whatever the reason, my parents were okay with me playing games on the computer so that's where the bulk of my gaming started. I played the Sims and all the other Maxis games, now long forgotten--Sim Ant, Sim Park, Sim Safari, Sim Tunes, Sim Tower, Sim Planet. Strangely, one of the few I haven't played... is Sim City. I don't even know why. I also played Age of Empires and World of Warcraft when it was still a map-based real-time-strategy. My favourite from the series will probably always be Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Mostly because you could blow up the sheep and pigs and seals by clicking on them a bunch of times. (Though I only ever blew up with pigs because I thought the sheep and the seals were too cute. This is how my mind works all the time--to this day my strategy for playing Pokemon and picking my teams is based mostly on which Pokemon I find the cutest and/or prettiest. No, I am not making this up. In my defense, it's served me very well.)

Again, my parent's mental block against all things video game only seemed to be associated with console games. Which makes it hilariously ironic that most of my Super Nintendo experiences were in my maternal grandmother's house. I don't even know why she had this since I never saw her playing it and I didn't have any cousins on that side until I was older, but Nana had a Super Nintendo that she would let my brother and me play. Since Super Nintendo used to come with a copy of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt, that's what I played. It was awesome. When I was eleven, the Pokemon craze was in full swing and it was still at a time when my relatives were sometimes remembering to send gifts on Giftmas and that I actually had a birthday; after saving the money for a year, I had enough to buy my very own Game Boy. And a copy of Pokemon Blue. I still have it. I played the absolute shit out of that game.

I've retained a habit from the days of having a Game Boy: I am an obsessive, compulsive game-saver.

I can't think of a single handheld game platform in the last several years that doesn't have a lithium or otherwise integrated battery. They come with chargers that specifically charge the built-in rechargeable battery, which is a good idea because it means you're not constantly buying batteries for your freaking game. I'm sure I sent a fuckton of money on batteries back then, much more than I even do on batteries for my vibrator--which should also tell you something about how I prioritize my needs. Everyone who remembers these days remembers what it feels like to be in the middle of something really fucking important and then your fucking battery died. Almost invariably as you were about to catch a Legendary Pokemon. Or, like, kick Ganon's ass in Zelda. (Why the shit is the game called 'Zelda'? That's like calling the Mario franchise 'Princess Peach'.) You don't have that problem with rechargeable integrated batteries. You just plug your game in when the battery gets low and keep playing without having to interrupt anything. You used to be able to buy A/C adapters and rechargeable batteries for Game Boys and shit, which I actually did have for my Game Boy Pocket, but the problem with those was that if your battery ran down and you needed to recharge, the Game Boy would reset if you plugged it in. In order to plug it in, you had to save and turn it off anyway.

So, yeah. I am the most obsessive-compulsive game-saver in the world. Like, every ten minutes I'm saving and I'm one of those loons who saves two or three times at a go just in case I was imagining it and didn't actually save successfully the first time.

It's all because those old game platforms could fucking die on you.

As glad as I am to have rechargeable internal batteries in my laptop and Game Boys (including, I might add, my Game Boy Advance SP), I was really peeved when I was trying to buy a new digital camera a couple of years ago. I specifically wanted a camera that didn't have its own internal battery. I actually wanted a camera that took regular batteries and I was really happy to find one. I don't even think they make any like that anymore--I bought mine in 2008 or 2009. Even though you can be really bored when your Game Boy or iPod or whatever dies on you because you didn't recharge it and then you can't plug it in anyway, it always infuriated me more to have my camera die on me. At least with a camera that operates on a couple of regular old AA batteries, I can just go into any convenience store or something and get new ones. So I'm never bothered when my batteries die because it's easy to replace them.

But dead batteries turned me into a compulsive game-saver.

And I think that drives a lot of people fucking insane!

Slow the Fuck Down!!

I think everyone is put off by people we perceive as 'moving too fast' in relationships--people who get too attached too quickly, people who say 'I love you!' before you're comfortable with that level of emotional investment, people who talk marriage and children after the second date. It depends on what you, personally, think is an acceptable rate of progression, naturally; but when someone surpasses it, regardless of your criteria, most of us are immediately put off and want to run in fear. It's one of those universally agreed-upon deal-breakers you see across the board in advice on the subject of dating--everything, from 'GQ' to 'Cosmo', whether the target audience is men or women, young or old, agrees that when someone is moving along too fast for you, it's time to break it off.

For me especially, this is a big deal. I have a much more intense negative reaction to this, in no small part because I myself take a very long time to establish those kinds of close emotional bonds with people. 'I love you' is something it takes a while for me to work up to, and while I have no trouble not being the first person to say it, when someone says it too early for my liking my immediate instinctive response is to flee. I very nearly did this with Max; he told me he loved me nearly a year before I went out with him, which frankly scared the shit out of me. But by then (lucky for him--and, it turns out, for me as well) I was attached to him as a friend so I told him that it was inappropriate and made me uncomfortable and he apologized and didn't bring the subject up again until I said it was okay.

Mostly I just think I come pre-wired not to want people who get that attached so quickly. I have never been and especially cuddly person, and, thanks to my upbringing and everything it's done to turn me into a complete emotional clusterfuck, I do not bond with people easily on any level. Establishing a friendship is hard enough for me. Establishing a romantic relationship is extremely difficult and frustrating for everybody involved because it's hard to make progress and regression is much too easy and much to excessive. Fortunately, Boything is as patient as they come. Yay.

But anyway. This is a story about the first time someone creeped me the fuck out by moving way too fast. It's a true story, and to be honest it probably has a bit to do with the fact that I am as wary of fast-movers as I am. The situation made me unbelievably uncomfortable. While I wouldn't like it any more today than I did then, neither would I freak out like I did from this. It put me off of dating, and guys in general, for a few years--mostly because I was young, inexperienced, and neurotic. The memory still makes me cringe.

The summer I was fifteen, I went with my mom and a friend of hers to a public pool in the friend's area. It was too crowded to do any actual swimming unless you wanted to bump into an awful lot of people. There were kids my age hanging out in groups, but nobody I knew and being shy I've never felt comfortable walking up to strangers and saying hello. Especially not strangers in packs. So boredom set in. A guy about a year or two older than me was paddling around and encountering the same no-room-to-swim problem. He was splashing about kind of awkwardly, like he was trying to show off but had nothing to actually show. And he was talking to himself, loudly, in what I assumed was an attempt to invite someone to answer him. It was a bit odd behaviour but didn't stand out. Eventually he stopped trying to swim around and came and sat up on the edge of the pool near me and we started a conversation.

'Tom' introduced himself to me, and straight away did something weird: he took my offered handshake hand and kissed the back of it like we were a Jane Austen adaptation. I pulled my hand away but didn't say anything; I don't even recall THINKING anything except that it was really, really strange. I was probably too shocked to think anything else because how do you anticipate that? We talked about movies and books and video games, and he seemed more than slightly awkward. His tone and manner of speaking, his body language, the way he was trying to maintain eye contact with me but only succeeded in leering, and the fact that he kept scooting much too close to me for comfort all seemed odd but didn't stand out as immediately problematic. After a little while the crowd thinned somewhat and Tom suggested we try swimming again.

I hoped being in the water would keep Tom from getting so close, but he was right back on me. He tried putting his hands on my shoulders and my back and I shook him off. Not knowing how to tell him I was uncomfortable, I asked him what he thought he was doing in hopes that he'd get the hint.

"I want to teach you to swim," Tom said. "So we can swim together."

"But I already know how to swim," I pointed out.

"Oh," he said sadly. "I just really need to hold you. Can I hold your hand so we can swim together?"

Even though I didn't want to, I said yes. (Why, Young!Me? WHY??) He put one arm around my shoulder and held me way, way too close and held my hand in his free one. This lasted all of about twenty seconds before I shook him off, pretending to see something on the bottom of the pool while trying to come up with an excuse to leave. All of this was starting to feel very weird and REALLY uncomfortable for me. I had no reason or obligation to stay or put up with it, and should have left, but I didn't know what to do. I blame being fifteen.

"You know, can I tell you something?" Tom asked.

"What?"

"I think I love you."

Finally my primitive little proto-human teenage brain snapped to attention and I immediately climbed out of the pool with the excuse that I had to go check in with my mom. I had every intention of hiding behind her until we could go home.


Somehow, Tom actually found where we were sitting (it was a really big pool complex so he must have been really searching) and tried to get my attention, walking way close and waving awkwardly right in front of my face. I ignored him, pretending to be engrossed in my book and with a convenient set of headphones. (They weren't plugged in, but he didn't know that. I find earbuds or headphones make a good prop to make people think you don't notice them, assuming you're listening to music and can't hear and are distracted.)


I'm almost completely sure that there was something wrong with Tom. A few years after this, my mom got a job working with kids who have mild to moderate autism; I used to go in every now and then to help out and those kids displayed mannerisms very, very similar to Tom's quirks. It would certainly explain why he acted the way he did and why he was so awkward and inappropriate. It doesn't make the situation any less creepy, however. You'd think his parents and teachers or guardians or someone would try and teach him that he can't say stuff like that to people he's only just met--when you have a kid with special needs, you really do have to accommodate those needs as best as you can. Part of that is learning to live with the various quirks and issues. Part of it also involves teaching them that certain behaviours, however innocent they might think the behaviours to be, are not acceptable. The guy was probably sixteen or seventeen (I didn't find out)--someone should have taught him better.


Oh well. It creeped me out then and is still weird to remember, but I'm not emotionally traumatized from it.


As a postscript: a few more years later, when I was still in my manga phase, I was browsing the shelves at a bookstore. I'm used to occasionally seeing the most radiantly socially inept guys hanging out in the manga/anime/graphic-novel section of bookstores. They don't often know how to strike up conversations so occasionally they will talk to themselves in hopes of enticing me (or another girl in the vicinity) into saying hello first. Sound familiar? So seeing a guy walking the aisles wondering aloud where the series he wanted was... that wasn't unusual. Except it struck a cord in my memory, particularly as I remembered Tom's particular way of doing this. (It involved being very dramatic and saying stuff like, "I'm never swimming underwater again!" and, "There's what I was looking for!!") As well as the sound of his voice.

Despite the fact that, yes, the situation was a very uncomfortable memory for me, I didn't (and still don't) remember exactly what he looked like. He was semi-dark-complected with dark hair and eyes but that's hardly a descriptive memory.

Even so, I was pretty damn sure that this was Tom and my 'flight' response kicked in right then and there.

I didn't buy any books that day.

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

Today, for the first time, it struck me that I come off as being very nonchalant and comfortable writing about the mistreatment I suffered growing up. Most of the time I'm not especially bothered or triggered or anything from writing them. By and large, singular memories--even the bad ones--don't really upset me to talk about. To a lot of people, this seems to suggest that they haven't had the negative ramifications on my life that I claim. Because, if that were the case, wouldn't talking about it be uncomfortable?

Well, no, it's not. Not usually. A few of them are uncomfortable to think about, but for the most part I haven't written about them and they're some of the more extreme cases. This does not, however, invalidate the fact that I still bear the psychological scars. I'm not exaggerating or faking. They are very much there and very much a real force in my life.

Just because abuse isn't extreme doesn't mean it doesn't count as abuse. My parents didn't chain me up in the garage or anything; I wasn't sold into prostitution; I wasn't beaten with cooking implements except for wooden spoons, which break. A lot of people had--and continue to have--much worse done to them. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would have seen my situation and dreamed of having a life that good. A lot of people, upon hearing that I consider the treatment I experienced at my parent's hands abusive, are quick to snap at me and point out that there are people who have so much worse and I have no right to complain.

But someone always has it worse. Almost no matter what happens to you, someone somewhere at some point is experiencing something even worse.

We don't tell people who are upset over a breakup that they shouldn't be crying because someone else's partner cheated with that person's sister and then married her and moved to Brazil but not before selling the family business and clearing out their bank accounts into private offshore accounts, leaving the dumped party alone and penniless with a bad case of herpes.

We don't tell people who've lost their job that they can't be upset about it because other people have been fired from their jobs and been jobless longer and have no money and their jobs are being made obsolete anyway so it's not like they're likely to get hired for anything more than minimum wage ever again.

We don't tell people diagnosed with cancer that they don't have a right to be devastated because it's only very early colon cancer, for goodness sake, they can usually nip that in the bud and you go on to live a normal life--there are people who have cancer in their hearts or their brains, so you with your pathetic teensy tush tumours don't have anything to bitch about.

Someone, somewhere, has it worse than you. But it doesn't invalidate your own negative experiences. It doesn't deny you the right to be upset. Going by the 'you-can't-be-sad-other-people-have-it-worse' mentality, nobody has a right to be depressed unless they're the most unfortunate person in the world. Which is dumb.

Abuse needn't have been extreme in order to be abuse. It's taken me a very long time to come to grips with the fact that what I experienced was abuse. It wasn't something I considered until recently, in part because I knew that other people were treated way worse than I was. Feeling all depressed about it was silly because it wasn't so bad.

As far as the negative experiences in my life that I have no trouble talking about go, they're not anything serious or horrifying enough to have been especially upsetting on their own. No one of them--again, apart from a few--would have, alone, caused the lasting emotional damage I'm stuck dealing with. But when they all combine, they're greater than their parts--a behemoth of bad experiences from which I have never recovered.

Yes, I survived. No, nothing seriously terrible happened.

But just because it wasn't that bad doesn't mean any of it was okay.

A Change of Heart

As I've mentioned before, I've known the boything, Max, for some years and was aware that he had extremely strong feelings for me for over a year before I decided to give him a chance. Of course, the biggest reason I didn't want to date him sooner was simply because I didn't feel the same way about him. He's sweet and cute, he's smart, he's funny, but as far as appearances go he isn't really my type. (Yes, I'm that shallow--most people are.) And as smart as he is, he also doesn't technically have any more than an eighth grade education, which sometimes makes it hard to talk to him on the level I'd like to. He's a quick learner, though, and remembers most of what new information I give him. He also seemed to be moving a little quickly--he told me he loved me when I still told him I wasn't interested in dating him, and he later revealed that he felt that way just a few months after we met. Frankly that kind of shit scares me stupid and had he told me that when it started I would have dropped him immediately because I don't like it when people become that intense that quickly. This isn't his normal M/O, however. He was just as shocked as I was that I'd managed to circumvent all of his 'rules' about relationships, that he fell so hard so quickly, and is almost completely unable to control himself around me in a way he has never experienced with anyone else. I think it's flattering and cute now, but at the time I was a little overwhelmed and it was one of many things that sort of made me wary of him as a potential partner.

But he grew on me over time and I started to become very fond of him in spite (and sometimes because) of some of these things. And this happened well before I said I'd go out with him. For a long time I wasn't sure I wanted to give him a chance, because of another thing that differed between us that I didn't know if I could cope with. Or, more appropriately, without.

Max is monogamous. I am not.

I was pretty aware that if I started a relationship with him, I'd be in it for a very long time and he was much too monogamous to be into anything like the polyamory I prefer or even a threesome, putting us in the absurd position of a guy who didn't want a threesome and a girl who did. I am also for all intents and purposes, bisexual--I think 'pansexual' describes me better but that's neither here nor there--and being in a completely monogamous relationship with a man I'd be deprived of a large facet of my sexual identity, which I wasn't sure I could be okay with.

Eventually I did tell him all of this because I wanted to be upfront. Being with him would mean I couldn't be with anyone else, male or female, and I wasn't sure I was capable of being happy with a big chunk of my personality and sexuality essentially banned. Max was understandably upset but took it shockingly well; he figured something like that was going to hold me back and acknowledged that it could potentially present an insurmountable obstacle. While a fantasy threesome was nice, he couldn't entertain the notion of a threesome. He didn't think he could be in that situation, even though it wasn't 'cheating' and he was sort of intrigued/into/turned on by the whole thing. He wouldn't be able to have sex with another woman, he said.

So we stalemated for a while with that standing between us. And then I just went, fuck it. I really like this guy, I've grown really attached to him, he adores me and he treats me really well, and he's patient and kind and extremely understanding about all the problems that other people think are too much to deal with. I told him I couldn't promise it would be permanent, and that I wasn't sure if I could be happy in the long term restricted to one partner only and unable to express a big part of my identity. But I wanted to give it a go. The months came and went and I got even more attached. Just like the sappy girly-girl I never thought I was, I fell stupid in love with this man and decided that I could live without certain things in my life if it meant I could have him.

I'm an extremely flirtatious person and Max is totally okay with this. He really doesn't mind me flirting with or kissing or making gropes with other people. Especially girl-people. That he thinks is hot. Which was frustrating for me for a while because I knew he found the idea of me with another woman appealing but didn't want to actually do anything about it. Being able to get some of my sexual frustration out of my system by being openly hitting on and kissing and fondling other women--enough that I didn't feel trapped or deprived like I thought I might--was a lot easier to cope with. I could mess around with some other ladies, then go home with Max to get downright deviant. It's not sex with a woman or comparable to sex with a woman by any stretch of the imagination, but it worked for me.

Again, the guy is pretty sublimely accommodating when it comes to me. He's extremely easygoing in general, as am I, so things that are typically major no-nos in other people's relationships are totally unremarkable and acceptable in ours. He's genuinely not at all bothered by the fact that, yes, I make obvious sexual overtures with other people right in front of him. He doesn't care and isn't jealous. He knows I adore him, and at the end of the day knows who I'm going home with and who I'm going to bed with. So what does it matter what I do otherwise? I feel quite fortunate that he has this open, accepting attitude. It would be much too much for most other people to want to deal with in a partnership.

What's turned out to be a major perk on his end is the fact that my sexuality is more or less an iceberg--only a very small portion of it is actually visible, and most of it is hidden away and it's a lot more sizable and complicated than most people are aware. He knew pretty quickly after meeting me that I was most definitely into some kinky stuff (it's probably pretty obvious, especially at the MDRF in a setting where I am unusually open and uninhibited and extremely frisky), but as more and more has come out he's been frequently very surprised at just how much and how kinky it all was. Some of these aren't things you just dump on someone all at once when you get together and trust that they'll be able to sort it all out and make sense of it and accept all of it right away. So it comes out a little bit at a time--certain things I wanted to try, the BDSM thing, that I wanted him to wear a collar, that I wanted to have a go at him with a strap-on. Most of them he's been quite delighted with. Others he's said no to. Among the things to which the answer was 'no' was the idea of a threesome--me and him and another girl. I knew it going in, and while I might have sometimes felt like I was missing out, I never felt like a big part of myself was missing.

Sometimes I'd talk about things I wanted to do with other women, but for the most part I didn't because I knew it was just going to potentially frustrate me because I wasn't going to be able to do it. And anyway, we've got handcuffs and spreader bars to try.

A few days ago I was feeling tremendously frisky all day, which tends to manifest as dirty text messages and near pornographic phone calls or Skype calls. I'm not exactly squeamish when it comes to sex and sexuality--by now that should be pretty fucking clear--but when I'm feeling unusually horny and wound up and stuff I do tend to talk in a way I don't otherwise talk and about things I don't otherwise discuss. Sometimes I use words or slang terms I don't like or never use. Sometimes I do stuff (like masturbate loudly over the phone) I wouldn't do the rest of the time. Sometimes I express a desire for a sexual role or experience that I don't normally want. Like wanting to be the sub every now and then. By and large, I'm the dominant one in this relationship and he's totally cool with that--except sometimes I just really want to be held down and ravaged. He's even more totally cool with that. Fortunately, the days I feel a bit subby tend to coincide with the days he wakes up extremely sexually aggressive and wants to pin me down and fuck me raw.

Which is how I started talking about threesomes again. Because I know it's not something he'd actually want to do, I don't really mention it very much, but for whatever reason that day I just decided to plant filthy mental images in his head and talked about how badly I, say, wanted to watch him go down on another woman. Maybe while I was over her face and she was doing the same to me. The hypothetical scenario just snowballed from there until I'd expressed a desire for just about every single solitary conceivable configuration of the female/male/female threesome.

And my god, was he into it.

Once the fog of lust had cleared we talked about it seriously.

It turns out that Max was thinking about this for a while. Even though jealousy is not and hasn't been a feature in the relationship thus far (and it probably won't be), he said that his initial refusal of the whole 'threesome' thing was because he didn't know if he'd be all right with involving someone else sexually, knowing that I could equally develop feelings for another woman. Or really anyone else. That he really wanted to give it a go but felt like he shouldn't want to give it a go. All of which he acknowledged as being irrational. Part of it is that I think he's a lot more secure with me now than he was at first--we've been together a while, we're comfortable with each other, and we're aware that there are certain things that are and aren't likely or even possible for the other. At this point, he knows I love him to bits. I'm pretty stuck on him and wouldn't be tempted away just by bringing a cute girl into the bedroom every now and then. That I don't fall for people that easily and am not likely to do so just because I boinked someone.

Basically, he's had more or less a total change of heart. He said he had no reason not to try it at least once because he really did want to give it a go--just that he wasn't sure if the partnership could weather it or that he could sideline what he calls his 'morals' in order to do something he's been taught isn't okay but that he has no emotional or psychological objections to doing and really wants to try. I know that sounds weird, by the way.

A regular fixture of our relationship as a whole, romantic and sexual and platonic together, is that I keep breaking all his rules. He never moves as fast with women as he did with me; he has a lot more self-control, sexually and romantically, with everyone else than he's able to muster with me; things like 'puppy eyes' and kittenish seduction that girls often do to get reactions from men don't do anything for him and even though he thinks it's cute/sexy, it doesn't 'work' on him the way it does on others except when I do it. One of my favourite stories with this one in particular is about the day we met. He used to boast a bit that he had phenomenal self-control and to be honest, he really does. Just not with me. He said he was totally immune to every girl and woman's 'puppy eyes' face--as cute as they always were, he could still resist them. The girls in the group all confirmed that that was indeed the case.

Well, I can't let a challenge like that go. So I gave him my 'puppy eyes' and he immediately melted and was totally enchanted. We'd said just a few words to each other before then--one of the literal first things I ever did to him was break his rules. It set the tone for the relationship as it would later develop.

Anyway.

The conversation got all steamy again but actually stayed serious. We told each other what it was we wanted from this hypothetical threesome. What was expected, what would be okay, what would be unacceptable. A lot of it was stuff like, 'So Axiom, what if I do ABC while she does XYZ to you?' 'That would be awesome but if we position it a little differently, she can do XYZ to me while I do the same to her,' '...score!! If I was gonna have a threesome this is exactly the kind of stuff I would want to happen.'

It was great how easily and quickly all our expectations fell into place and lined up. We do get along pretty effortlessly and harmoniously most of the time. I know at this point I'm basically spoiled because this particular relationship is moving along so effortlessly. Hurdles will happen, but I dunno when or how I might deal with them. In the meantime, I'm just going to have crazy dirty sex with him and then fall asleep drooling on his back.

So, yeah. I just want to get the know any potential second woman before I say whether or not I'll be comfortable with her; I don't really mind being a sub but I don't want to be restrained in any way in this particular situation. Max said he's comfortable with me and this potential third partner doing whatever we like with one another, and with us doing anything we like with him, but that he wouldn't be able to have vaginal intercourse with her because he wouldn't be able to entirely circumvent his mental blocks. (He knows this is silly, as well, but it's a harmless hangup and I'm not at all bothered by it.)

Then the conversation turned into a sex log again and I spent the night with a hand in my pants on Skype with him.

Ultimately, I don't especially care one way or the other whether a threesome happens or not or how many times it happens. I'm hugely excited and happy and insanely aroused that he genuinely wants to do it, and isn't just putting up with the idea because he knows it'll make me happy. If that were the case, i wouldn't let him go any further. If we do do it, that's awesome!! If we don't, that's perfectly okay as well.

Because I love him, and he's a lot more important to me.

Would be all kind of hot if we did, though.

You're Doing it Wrong (and here's why)

It drives me nuts when people consistently make statements or in some other way incorporate faulty beliefs or incorrect facts that I know 100% for certain aren't right. I don't like being wrong, so other people should be equally adverse to it! This is just one of many things that drives me nuts because I know it's wrong--and why.

When movies, TV shows, books, or anything else use the plot device of longtime childhood friends who realize their attraction and fall in love and get married and live happily ever after. I hate it when people do this because, for all its more or less constant use in the media, this doesn't actually happen in real life. This isn't a case of me going, 'Oh, well, I don't like this so no one else should!' but a legitimate case of there being actual scientific theories (which are, by the way, incredibly fucking sound and completely correct, just like the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution) and evidence to back it up.

And we can all thank the nineteenth-century researcher Edvard Westermarck for working it out.

His theory, first published in 1891, was named the Westermarck Effect for him and simply states that you are programmed to be repulsed by anyone you grow up alongside. Westermarck developed his hypothesis by studying Israeli tribes who raised their children communally in groups according to age--kind of like grade school. He found that marriages were almost invariably between people who did not belong to the same age group--subsequent research has found this to be true across the board. Everywhere. It doesn't matter where you come from, your culture, or your sexual preferences. You are more or less guaranteed not to be in any way sexually or romantically interested in people you grew up with. Of course there are exceptions, but these are, well, exceptional--few, far between, and abnormal. Think about the kids you went to school with, especially if you lived in a very small community where you had the same classmates your entire school career. How often did students from the same grade become and remain romantically involved? I remember very few; when it happened, it was between students who were new or students who simply hadn't known each other long. And that's all Westermarck's Effect manifesting.

Nobody knows exactly why this happens but the general consensus is that it's some sort of psycho-evolutionary safety net designed to discourage us from inbreeding, which prevents us from perpetuating bad genes and destroying our genetic variability and doing inconvenient things like going extinct. Through as an aside, as genetic variability goes humans are pretty freaking similar. 99.9% of all our DNA is identical--the .1% that varies is what's used in genetic testing. Whether you like it or not, you are pretty goddamn closely related to everyone on the face of the planet. You have more genetically in common with the tribes of the Amazon Basin or anyone else (including, it's worth pointing out, your romantic and sexual partners, all of them) than, for example, any two chimpanzees who live in the same troupe. Again, nobody is quite sure why this is. The most likely answer is that at some point in our semi-recent (within the last few hundred thousand to a million years) history there was some kind of mass extinction event that wiped out all but a few of the humans on earth. It was either pure dumb luck or these lucky survivors had some unknown and unidentified genetic trait that offered an advantage against--or protection from--whatever killed everyone else. Either way, they were all probably closely related, meaning that only their very close DNA survived.

But still, that .1% of our DNA is what stops us from dying out and evolution is quite clever and has a lot of safety nets in place designed to stop you from committing incest and creating creepy mutant offspring with webbed feet. Think about your opposite-sex siblings, if you have them--or someone you know who has opposite-sex siblings. Especially if you're a girl bitching about your brothers. What's a common complaint? That their brothers smell disgusting. But unrelated people don't notice it. Why? Because you're actually having a negative hormonal reaction to your siblings. Your body is programmed to be disgusted by the scent of your siblings so you're less likely to have sex with them.

The thing about the Westermarck Effect is that it isn't tied to your biological siblings, as Westermarck's research in the Israeli tribes confirmed. It just so happens that the children you are most likely to be the closest to in your youth are also most likely going to be close relatives--siblings, half-siblings, cousins, and others with whom it would be reproductively dicey to have children. But being a psychological--rather than physical--effect, it makes no distinction between adopted siblings and blood relatives. If you grow up with them, you find them sexually repulsive.

Even the places where the Westermarck Effect seems to have totally failed to take hold, it still often does a good job as evidence that the theory is correct. Blood siblings who have never met--adopted or raised separately--who meet later in life sometimes develop a sexual attraction to one another. It's because, having never known one another in childhood, the Westermarck Effect never took hold.

It doesn't last forever. It appears that, on average, the Westermarck Effect dissipates by the time you're six or so, so anyone who came into your life after that is less likely to seem so romantically off-putting. It seems kind of young--after all, siblings and cousins can be much further apart than that in age. Just one of mine is less than seven years younger than me. But the point still stands: if you grow up around someone, you think of them as siblings, and as such you unconsciously reject them as sexual partners because your brain is trying to make sure you don't do something stupid, like boink your cousins.

Romances between childhood friends can and do happen. Just very infrequently, and such pairings don't often last long. It's just one of many things most people don't realize their bodies and minds are doing in order to make sure they do what's evolutionarily best for the species: be attracted to the right people, have sex with them often, and keep the gene pool from growing algae.

desperation is the mother of unsavoury business practices

I've mentioned this before, but my high school and the teachers had some pretty stupid and restrictive bathroom policies enforced with a near Gestapo-like zeal. Asking to be excused during class was seen as disrespectful, lazy, deliberately inconsiderate to the teacher, and automatically assumed to have ulterior motives. It didn't seem like a single teacher believed that students asking for a bathroom pass were actually going to go to the bathroom--or at least, not solely. We were also planning on making pipe bombs, staging orgies, shooting heroin, and engaging in a lot of good old-fashioned vandalism. The only time most people could use the bathroom during the day was at lunchtime because it was the only time and place you didn't need a pass or permission. The same teachers who thought a bathroom break was a sign of juvenile delinquent behaviour would also do incredibly fucked up things like mark you for an unexcused absence or unexcused tardy--or worse, actually lock you out of the classroom and refuse to let you in--which, if you had more than a handful of, could prevent you from graduating and even get you suspended or expelled. This is not in any way an exaggeration. It's entirely 100% fucking true.

So urinary needs were a taboo at that school. Most of the time the teacher would just flat-out refuse to let you go, but some of them were even more sadistic. It wasn't uncommon, at the start of each new semester, for certain teachers to give out pre-printed bathroom passes, usually just two or three of them, that could be used in that class during the semester. If you lost or used them and had to pee one day, you were pretty well totally out of luck. You used all your passes, you can't go, you gotta sit there until you pee your pants. Similarly, some would write passes only in the school's agenda books that were handed out every year, and again, if you didn't have it then you were shit outta luck.


All of which is a big freaking problem if, like me, you have a clockwork bladder that demands you relieve it at more or less the same time every day. Teachers started getting suspicious at regular requests for bathroom passes because they thought we were all going to some pre-arranged regular meeting centred around illegal activities.

The limited bathroom passes were the worst. Yeah, you could at least go pee a couple of times over the semester, but it contributed to the school's already ruthless black market.


Again, this is not an exaggeration; I think most schools have something in the way of under-the-table or black markets where contraband items--snacks, test answers, drugs, and other things we weren't supposed to have--could be bought and sold. But because none of them were available on school grounds, the people who had them basically had monopolies and acted much like drug dealers. They raised prices, bullied students, and preyed on our desperation for their own personal gain. I'm sure most of the people responsible are either in a ditch on fire, dead, or in jail by now. They were that kind of hardcore dealers.


It was like that.


Since there were over 2100 kids at the school (it's over 2500 now), almost no teacher could keep track of how many times an individual student used a bathroom pass so if you were so inclined, you could get more in secret from the black market. Sometimes the passes were photocopied or duplicated; other times they were bought from kids who didn't intend to use them and sold to the ones who needed them. For actual money. Sometimes drugs and sexual favours, as well.


There were a lot of things wrong at that school but the presence of a black market for fucking bathroom passes says a lot about the social climate, the culture, and the ludicrousness of some of the more arbitrary school rules.

Ew, Gross!

I was less squeamish as a kid than I am as an adult. I think most people are kind of the same way. Or at least, I'm still equally squeamish about the same number of things but they're not the same ones that grossed me out as a child. Mold didn't used to repulse me but it does now; kissing used to make me go 'eew!' and hide my eyes, whereas it obviously doesn't anymore. (That would be weird if it did considering I have a boyfriend and am fucking him. I wonder how often that happens? People too squeamish to kiss other people but have no objections to the horizontal squelchy.) Even though I'm still not exceptionally repulsed by this particular gross-out, it still bothers me a lot more now than it used to.

Dissections.

Science class animal dissections are kind of mythic rites of passage to school kids. Everyone knows that it's going to be required of them at some point in their school career and successfully hurdling this particular curriculum requirement is the point at which you are a proper mature student. All my classmates had really mixed feelings about it. Some anticipated it, some dreaded it; personally, I didn't feel strongly one way or another but the thought of cutting things open didn't really bother me. It still doesn't really bother me much, except for the obvious lack of forethought that leads school board officials to conclude that it's totally not a bad idea to equip a bunch of twelve-year-old hormonal adolescents with scalpels. So it didn't cause me the kind of distress it caused some of my classmates; my best friend at the time, Hana, was on the other end of the spectrum. At that point she was a committed vegetarian and very into animals and also really, really not wanting to do the dissection. You could be excused if your parent wrote a note explaining why you (or they, or both) objected to the dissection. Hana's mom thought she was being dramatic and so no such excuse was made. Once Frog Dissection Day rolled around, she got one whiff of formaldehyde and promptly keeled over in a faint on the floor. In the end she got the school administration to excuse her. She also got a concussion and five stitches.

So I breezed through the dissections without a problem. We cut up all kinds of things and I never really had any bad experiences except that the chemicals smelled terrible and I have a sensitive sense of smell and an even more sensitive gag reflex. Smells that other people don't notice or are totally unfazed by will make me violently reverse my gastrointestinal tract. The smells of certain plants and flowers, cleaning products, chemicals, foods, and others almost without number can make me extremely sick for which I have never received an iota of sympathy. Even though I've had that extremely sensitive gag reflex my entire life--I couldn't undergo a throat swab without puking until I was in high school--my parents always just accused me of being a drama whore. Like I was throwing up on purpose for attention. Without considering the fact that, as far as attention-seeking devices go, there are a lot more easy to bear and way less messy methods than puking; or that I was always the most upset that these things made me so violently ill when no one else was ever bothered and was always embarrassed and upset by it.

Anyway.

It seems a bit weird to me that I wasn't more bothered by the fact that I was cutting up and removing body parts from a creature that was at one point alive and breathing and going about its daily business in happy ignorance of the fact that it would one day be pinned to a tray in a biology class. Part of it was, I think, that most of them didn't have faces. Or not a face that was immediately recognizable. Nothing I found especially cute or heartbreaking. And, most importantly, I think, none of them looked at me. Most of them didn't even have eyes--things like bugs and clams and little squids. Others, like frogs and mice, had eyes but were pinned on their backs so they weren't making any unnerving eye contact during the dissection. I list this possibility with a reasonable amount of confidence because of the one and only dissection that nearly made me vomit: a goat's eyeball.

It was in seventh or eighth grade. For the first time I was not only dissecting something that was looking at me, but it was nothing but eyeball. I can still see it in my head--horrible, tangerine-sized milky dead eye with all the optic nerves severed. When I cut into it, it leaked a pungent yellowish jelly-like substance that still haunts my dreams. It was over a dozen years ago and I'm still uncomfortable looking at lemon Jello because of the similarities.

This particular dissection was never finished. I got as far as picking the lens and the cornea out before I had to go puke. Rather fortunately, by then the science department had agreed that students throwing up and/or passing out would just be excused from the lesson. I wasn't sure I would be believed that I was actually bothered by this dissection when others hadn't done that before, because I was so used to being accused of faking and being dramatic whenever I got sick at home, but she didn't say anything and excused me without a word.

She probably understood.

After all, she had an entire jar of eyeballs on her desk so presumably she was aware it was weird to be stared at like that.